bring me the head of nicholas carr

But by whatever combination of factors, Facebook has, for now, achieved an unprecedented level of influence in societies across the globe, as Vaidhyanathan documents so well. Could it have been otherwise? Certainly. But that is irrelevant. If we live our lives through Facebook, our lives will be shaped by Facebook. If Facebook mediates our public discourse, then that discourse will be shaped by the formal properties of the platform. The critical point to register is that we will be worked over by the medium, as McLuhan has put it. We will conform to its image. And this will happen regardless of how judiciously and responsibly we post.

As some doggerelist once said of Nietzsche, He might say, were he here today, of media old and new: Give a book a face and it will gaze back into you. The moral of the story here, in a review of a new book, amounts to “count the costs and pay the price,” though without the concision. If you feel that social media is detrimental to your personal happiness and to civic health, then delete your account and walk away. Learn from the example of the Amish, Sacasas says. Earlier, though, he sounds a deterministic note in suggesting that Facebook’s engineers have learned too well from casinos and junk food how to make their product “addictive,” which, as far as I can tell, is just a more concise way of saying “Lord, grant me analog contentment, but not yet.” He criticizes Vaidhyanathan for urging us to strengthen our social institutions and firm up our moral norms in response to the deleterious effects of social media, preferring to emphasize the need for creating new, robust practices in a post-SocMed age rather than seeking to recover older ones, which strikes me as a distinction with only a 4,000-word academic difference. But then what makes the Amish immune to the supposed “addictiveness” of modern technology? How are we supposed to take inspiration from them if the superstructure and the demiurge and our own traitorous nucleus accumbens are all conspiring against us to eliminate whatever free will the philosophers and neuroscientists still allow us to cling to?

I don’t mean to be harsh. I just feel like I’ve read this article a hundred times already, though thank God for small favors, this one didn’t cite Nicholas Carr. Invoking Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes in a discussion of why we say one thing about Facebook and do another is just the rustling of academic plumage, when the salient point is, as always, that human beings frequently desire mutually exclusive things. Our reasoning processes, such as they are, are frequently too weak and easily exhausted to resolve those contradictions. We often experience agency and responsibility as a burden and seek to give it away cheaply, only to complain of all these cumbersome restraints preventing us from being our best selves. Like the guy who’s brave and anxious for the fight so long as some strong men are holding him back, we talk a good game about all the refined pursuits we so wish we had time for, but when the opportunity repeatedly presents itself, we find ourselves keeping up with the Kardashians while living shallowly and sucking the marrow out of a KFC bucket meal. That vacillation, that incoherence, that popular dance known as the bad-faith shuffle — that’s not an anomaly in need of explanation. That’s the human condition.

The lesson we’re slowly beginning to learn, though, is that they’re not a harmless vice. Used the way we currently use them, smartphones keep us from being our best selves. The world is starting to make up its mind about whether it’s worth it and whether the sugary hits of digital pleasure justify being worse, both alone and together.

As I’ve said a time or two dozen, we keep ourselves from being our “best selves;” smartphones are just the latest convenient excuse we strew across our own path. If it somehow becomes widely accepted that phones are no longer considered an acceptable excuse for our shortcomings, we’ll invent another one. That’s the human condition. Sartre may have been a garbage human being, but his concept of bad faith almost makes everything else about him worth it.

The article makes full use of the latest terminology from neuroscience, of course. This is how we like to deny our agency these days, by pretending that we’re at the mercy of our neural pathways and dopamine spurts. But those neurochemical factors were always involved in our omnipresent battles with temptation, even when we didn’t have the technology to observe them. Nothing has changed since Paul was lamenting how “the good that I would, I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do.” The fact that we talk about neurotransmitters instead of willpower or virtue now doesn’t change the fact that the solution is still the same as it’s always been: reflect on your behavior, acknowledge any flaws that need correcting, and start practicing new habits. If you can’t do that, it’s probably because you don’t actually care enough to do so. Admitting that, though — that’s the problem. I remember an old punchline about having never seen someone work so hard to avoid work — similarly, I’m always amused/amazed at how much effort people will put into rationalizing and excusing their bad habits rather than practice good ones.

Look, I’ve had a smartphone for six years. I mostly use it for work, and otherwise it sits on my dresser, untouched, for hours. I don’t surf the web on it. The only game I have on it is a chess app, and I rarely play it. I don’t text people just to chat. Am I superhuman to be able to resist this supposedly-immense gravitational pull of dopamine rushes and novelty bias? I can assure you I’m not. You know what I do instead? I make time to have in-depth conversations with the Lady of the House, and I set aside a couple hours almost every day to read books. There is no possibility of being distracted by a stupid toy phone, no matter how insidious the intentions of engineers at Google, because I’m consciously aware that these are the things I’d rather do than anything else on Earth. If you find yourself repeatedly preferring to thumb your phone rather than talk to your spouse, maybe that says something uncomfortable about the quality of your relationship. If you’d rather browse aimlessly through the app store than read a book, maybe you’re not actually interested in reading, even though some aspirational part of you thinks you should be. Those are the sorts of unsettling questions most of us would rather avoid, even at the expense of our dignity as we make pathetic excuses for why we never do the things we claim to want to do. By pretending to be enfeebled, we somehow, counterintuitively, salvage our pride.

Discipline is a verb, not a noun. It’s not a “thing” you “get” in order to perform actions. It is the consistent performing of actions. You only know you have it in hindsight, when you look back at a pattern of consistent accomplishments. Until then, there’s a hundred tiny trials every day. You can either practice skills and habits to better cope with them, or you can allow them to defeat you and whine about it.

“But you don’t understand!” people like Andrew-Gee will sputter. “Parents are too often on the phone to greet their children upon arriving home! Mothers are too distracted by texting to pay attention to their breastfeeding infants! These are some of the most fundamental, important aspects of our lives! It’s too terrible to accept the implications for our character if being distracted is a choice we’re all making, rather than something being imposed on us!”

Stephen Heiner, like countless other people, read Nicholas Carr’s bookThe Shallows and came away with a renewed determination to reclaim his neuro-territory from the pernicious imperialism of personal technology. His guerrilla tactics are likewise predictable: write things by hand, avoid multitasking, etc. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about doing things the long, slow way, but again, as with nearly everything else that has been written in praise of Carr’s message, the problem is that it substitutes a technical solution for what is more a question of value. In other words, this, to me, is a job for Sartre’s conception of bad faith.

Carr starts from a conception that others have called the “contemplative literate subject” and assumes it as the default. He seems to think that what demands explanation is the fact that fewer people today (however one would quantify such things) seem inclined to live a life of literary introspection. I, on the other hand, start from the premise that we are alwaysdivided against ourselves, wanting to have mutually exclusive things, lacking the discipline and motivation to resolve the conflict. I suggest to you that most people don’t know what they want out of life, and that this is, and has always been, the norm. I suggest that their oft-stated desire to live more profoundly is aspirational — that is, they realize that it looks good to profess such a goal, even if they’re not particularly motivated to achieve it. And I suggest that the reason so many people have happily taken to Carr’s message is because they recognize how useful it is in allowing them a bad-faith excuse, a way to avoid the sort of uncomfortable soul-searching that might call upon them to change their lives. They are content to forfeit their agency and act like the helpless prisoners of dimly-understood forces beyond their control.

I don’t mean “change” in the sense of substituting a pen and paper for a netbook or smartphone — that’s the sort of trivial self-improvement scheme or productivity hack you can find in any self-help book. I’m saying, what happens if you start thinking about why you spend so much time allowing your energy to be dissipated by idly thumbing your phone instead of reading a good book, or why it is that you spend so much of your day in a high-tech work environment that leaves you feeling exhausted and empty? What if it turns out that you don’t really want to read books because you’re not actually a profound person? What if a life of watching sitcoms and sports honestly sounds good enough to you, but you’re afraid that admitting it would be devastating to your social status and self-image? What if you start to suspect that you’re spending all your time working at a job you hate because it pays the sort of money you need to live the lifestyle you’ve somehow happened into, and besides, all of your expensive education went into preparing you for it, and sunk-cost fallacy notwithstanding, you can’t even begin to consider changing course now, and besides, your family depends on you playing your role, and oh, God, how did you ever end up with a spouse and three kids to begin with, and where oh where could you even consider admitting that some days, you feel ambivalent enough to contemplate just driving off into the sunset and never thinking about any of them again?

Most people, I suspect, are practiced enough at burying such speculation before it asserts itself, and have been since they were adolescents. Thus, when a public intellectual comes along to tell them how their dissatisfaction is due to the fact that technology has rewired their brains, they have a ready-made headstone to put on top of it.

But then there are the people Nicholas Carr interviewed, and Carr himself: people who know what it is like to be lost in a book, who value that experience, but who have misplaced it — who can’t get back, as Lucy Pevensie for a time can’t get back to Narnia: what was an opening to another world is now the flat planked back of a wardrobe. They’re the ones who need help, and want it, and are prepared to receive it…I don’t know whether an adult who has never practiced deep attention — who has never seriously read for information or for understanding, or even for delight — can learn how. But I’m confident that anyone who has ever had this facility can recover it: they just have to want that recovery enough to make sacrifices for it, something they will only do if they can vividly recall what that experience was like.

What do I want? What do I need? Why do I want it? What’s in it for me? Thus did the Beastie Boys provide us with a rhythmic, rhyming conceptual framework for investigating those goals which remain unmet despite our professed intentions.

Jacobs talks earlier in the book about the different reasons why people read. Some people are after an experience of raptness, of being immersed in a book to the point of forgetting to eat dinner or go to bed on time. But some are not so much interested in reading books as in having read them — books are merely instrumental, a means by which to have improved one’s character, raised one’s I.Q., or boosted one’s status. (Both tendencies can coexist in the same individual at different times, of course; I speak from experience.)

We understand this in other contexts. Some people genuinely enjoy exercise, and being fit is just a nice bonus for something they would do anyway. Some people would like to have exercised, and would like for other people to see them as fit, but aren’t so keen on actually doing it. They like the idea of being healthy and slender, but they also like the experience of relaxing and indulging. The irresistible force of their vanity meets the immovable object of their laziness.

Being conflicted like that is, I would suggest, much more of a “natural” human state than being highly motivated and disciplined. We vacillate between different impulses all the time. We desire mutually exclusive things and avoid making a hard choice between them. We fear that what we really want isn’t what we should want. Our tastes and appetites change over time. And we inevitably frame our choices in the most flattering way possible. No, really, I would have exercised if not for… Honestly, I love reading books, but these gadgets, see, they’re rewired my brain…

We feel the trembling uncertainty along these fault lines in our character and hurriedly dash back to the safety of such comforting narratives. But it is precisely those cracks in the tectonic plates of our personality which invite us to explore a little deeper. What if you’re not truly the person you thought you were, or the person you’d like to be? Would that be such a bad thing? What are you willing to sacrifice to get there, then?

But when it comes to consumer convenience, we need to consider whether easier really is always better. Online shopping, for example, is already so effortless that we often don’t remember we’ve ordered something until the package arrives at our door. What happens when consumption becomes even less of a conscious process — when, say, our smart cupboards and refrigerators, empowered to monitor what we’re using, start making buying decisions autonomously?

…As important, might it be possible to make things too easy? Systems like Amazon’s Dash are attractive because they let us skip routine tasks, such as managing the household, which gives us more time for things that are more important to us. But when we eliminate even a mundane task, we also lose some of the mental skills that the task required. Granted, losing the mental skills needed to compile a shopping list hardly seems a cause for worry. But we should consider that loss as part of the broader “de-skilling” of everyday life with the spread of automated conveniences.

As propaganda, the video seems more like a condemnation of consumption than a celebration of it. All that stuff, the same stuff, used and discarded day after day. It’s the kind of montage that a movie director would use to show just how sad and soulless a character’s life was. And the idea of shopping buttons placed just within our reach conjures an uneasy image of our homes as giant Skinner boxes, and of us as rats pressing pleasure levers until we pass out from exhaustion. But according to Amazon, these products represent the actual rhythm of life, any interruption of which might lead not only to inconvenience but to the kind of coffee-deprived despair that we see when the woman realizes that she has run out of K-cups. That’s the real dystopia: not that our daily lives could be reduced to a state of constant shopping but that we might ever have to, even for a moment, stop shopping.

…But what if there is actual value in running out of things? The sinking feeling that comes as you yank a garbage bag out of the box and meet no resistance from further reinforcements is also an opportunity to ask yourself all kinds of questions, from “Do I want to continue using this brand of bag?” to “Why in the hell am I producing so much trash?” The act of shopping—of leaving the house and going to a store, or, at the very least, of one-click ordering on the Amazon Web site—is a check against the inertia of consumption, not only in personal economic terms but in ethical ones as well. It is the chance to make a decision, a choice—even if that choice is simply to continue consuming. Look, we’re all going to keep using toothpaste, and the smarter consumer is the person who has a ten-pack of tubes from Costco in the closet. But shopping should make you feel bad, if only for a second. Pressing a little plastic button is too much fun.

Just to be clear: these guys are making like Amish elders evaluating what are essentially little wi-fi buttons you can put around your house that will allow you to add everyday-use household items to your Amazon shopping cart. I mean, you could still do it the old-fashioned way, like we did back in my day, and walk around the house with a laptop or a smartphone to make a shopping list. But in our slave new world, you will still get an email to confirm that you did intend to add that item. Your kids cannot accidentally order 700 boxes of dryer sheets by playing with the button. There would seem to be little danger that this will somehow prove to be more addictive than using Amazon’s already-existing one-click option. No one is going to turn into a hoarder and bankrupt themselves ordering 20,000 jars of Peter Pan peanut butter and Welch’s grape jelly because it’s “too much fun” pressing this button. If anything, this would seem to be marginally more useful than those smartwatches that the tech geeks have been fapping over for the last couple years, and I don’t remember anybody seeing those as harbingers of dystopia.

So, yes. Roberts asks if technology like this will “make us stupid”. Crouch, when he’s not standing outside the Dollar General wearing a cilice and urging shoppers to repent, seems to think that most people normally fill in the lacunae in their hectic days by contemplating the essence of the good life, rather than cursing the shitty luck that caused them to run out of trash bags and detergent now, of all days, for chrissakes. Like Calvin’s dad, both sound eager to remind harried consumers how stress and hard work builds character. If this sounds awfully familiar, why, yes, we were just talking about this.

Thus, there’s a very sinister and disturbing implication to be drawn from Carr’s work—namely, that only the rich will be able to cultivate their skills and enjoy their life to the fullest while the poor will be confined to mediocre virtual substitutes—but Carr doesn’t draw it. Here again we see what happens once technology criticism is decoupled from social criticism. All Carr can do is moralize and blame those who have opted for some form of automation for not being able to see where it ultimately leads us. How did we fail to grasp just how fun and stimulating it would be to read a book a week and speak fluent Mandarin? If Mark Zuckerberg can do it, what excuses do we have?

“By offering to reduce the amount of work we have to do, by promising to imbue our lives with greater ease, comfort, and convenience, computers and other labor-saving technologies appeal to our eager but misguided desire for release from what we perceive as toil,” notes Carr in an unashamedly elitist tone. Workers of the world, relax—your toil is just a perception! However, once we accept that there might exist another, more banal reason why people embrace automation, then it’s not clear why automation à la Carr, with all its interruptions and new avenues for cognitive stimulation, would be of much interest to them: a less intelligent microwave oven is a poor solution for those who want to cook their own dinners but simply have no time for it. But problems faced by millions of people are of only passing interest to Carr, who is more preoccupied by the non-problems that fascinate pedantic academics; he ruminates at length, for example, on the morality of Roomba, the robotic vacuum cleaner.

…How, the critics ask, could we be so blind to the deeply alienating effects of modern technology? Their tentative answer—that we are simply lazy suckers for technologically mediated convenience—reveals many of them to be insufferable, pompous moralizers. The more plausible thesis—that the growing demands on our time probably have something to do with the uptake of apps and the substitution of the real (say, parenting) with the virtual (say, the many apps that allow us to monitor kids remotely)—is not even broached. For to speak of our shrinking free time would also mean speaking of capital and labor, and this would take the technology critic too far away from “technology proper.”

I don’t have the breadth of knowledge to be an actual critic, so it pleases me when someone who does have it says what I’ve been saying all along. It makes me feel a bit like the kid who first noticed the emperor’s danglies swinging in the breeze.

Leaving aside the whole difficult question of whether most people actually want to live up to Carr’s ideal vision of the contemplative, literate citizen, or whether they just dimly recognize that it makes them look good to at least profess to want it, the simple fact remains that most people simply don’t have the fucking time and energy after a long day of work to relax by reading modernist literature before bed instead of scrolling aimlessly through Facebook (or to go for a walk according to the exacting standards of another elitist twat). People who actually, you know, work for a living have bigger and more urgent problems to worry about than whether their brains are getting the correct sort of exercise by sending text messages instead of composing letters with quill and inkwell.

And so fretting about one’s technological consumption habits is becoming just one more trivial class signifier, one more way for people with the money to afford artisanal, free-range, handcrafted leisure time to conspicuously signal their status. The revolution is over, or, rather, it was stillborn to begin with. The bums, as always, are the ones who lose.

In the end, technology is just a conduit for our own humanity. We complain that we’ve become addicted to glowing screens, but it’s less the screens themselves than what’s behind them: thousands upon thousands of other humans, all interacting with each other in degrees of real time, a mirror of society itself. I don’t believe that interacting with other people more makes me any less willing to reflect on how I fit in to this tapestry of lives.

You’ve heard me say many times that all the hand-wringing about technology’s pernicious effects on our souls is a disingenuous means of avoiding the harder questions about what it means to flourish as a human being, about how many different ways there are to do so. Likewise, taking for granted that an authentic life must contain ample amounts of reflective solitude is an exercise in question-begging, one which privileges the accomplishments of the intellect over the apprehensions of intuition. Contemplative stillness does not necessarily bring one closer to the “truth” of existence, and I say that as a devotee.

Soylent is the ultimate fast food – but it’s unclear why we feel such an intense need for more time. If you’re struggling to make ends meet, juggling the demands of family and several part-time jobs, you might well dream of having an extra day in the week. But I doubt whether many who are in this position would consider giving up meals in order to work even harder than they already do, and in any case they aren’t the people to whom the food replacement is being marketed. It’s those that are reasonably well off, and yet think of themselves as being chronically pressured, that are being targeted.

It’s worth asking how we’ve become as time-poor as we feel we are today. I’m old enough to remember discussions of 40 or 50 years ago about how we’d fill our days when most kinds of human labour were done by machines. Technology is largely a succession of time-saving devices. It’s strange, then, that an age of unprecedented technological advance should also be one of such acute time-poverty. Are we really dreaming of living more slowly? Or could it be that many of us are secretly addicted to the fast life?

One answer to these questions can be gleaned from the writings of the 17th Century mathematician Blaise Pascal, who invented the modern theory of probability and designed the world’s first urban mass transit system. In his Pensees, a series of reflections mostly devoted to religious topics, Pascal suggested that humans are driven by a need for diversion. A life that’s always time-pressed might seem a recipe for unhappiness, but in fact the opposite is true. Human beings are much more miserable when they have nothing to do and plenty of time in which to do it. When we’re inactive or slow down the pace at which we live, we can’t help thinking of features of our lives we’d prefer to forget – above all, the fact that we’re going to die. By being always on the move and never leaving ourselves without distraction, we can avoid such disturbing thoughts.

Similarly, the late-twentieth-century philosopher Alanis Morrissette questioned our ability to handle silence without thinking about our bills, our exes, our deadlines, or when we think we’re going to die, wondering if we merely suffer through it while longing for the next distraction. Well, she may not have been able to carry a tune to save her life, but she at least possessed more penetrating insight into the human psyche than a naïf like Nicholas Carr, who still gets called “essential reading” for peddling the sort of story that people love to hear, namely, that it’s not our fault we never wrote that novel, seized the day, sucked the marrow out of life; technology rewired our brains and took our fate out of our hands.

This becomes a convenient excuse to avoid the introspection which might reveal some unpleasant personal truths. Maybe I don’t enjoy reading books and living deliberately. Maybe I don’t have any deep and meaningful friendships. Maybe I actually prefer to spend my evenings watching reality TV and snacking on junk food. Maybe I just realize that professing higher aspirations is what people of a certain cultural class are expected to do, and I don’t have the courage to set myself against that. Maybe I’m just not particularly smart, brave, talented or special at all, and if so, is that necessarily a bad thing?

These are the sorts of questions that will never be raised if you take people at face value when they complain about forces beyond their control preventing them from realizing their dreams. People want mutually exclusive things all the time without seeming to be aware of it.

Don’t get me wrong. I wholeheartedly encourage people to spend time reading, focusing, introspecting, and all those other qualities that comprise the “contemplative literate subject“. I aim for that ideal myself. Achieving it on my terms, however, has required some tradeoffs. I’ve turned down a few opportunities for career advancement, which has probably reduced my esteem in the eyes of others in addition to the obvious financial downside. One reason why I’ve never wanted to have children (another choice with at least some social disapproval) was because of the cost involved in raising them, which would make it difficult if not impossible to resist such career opportunities. I’ll buy my jeans from Goodwill for seven bucks apiece and have my $50 Kmart winter coat, which I’ve had for fifteen years, sewn and patched because I’d rather spend my disposable income on more books. (I’m not saying that’s a hardship, just that I definitely do not cut a dashing, fashionable figure, which seems to be an important thing to many people.) And even if you do succeed in carving out enough space in your life to cherish contemplation, you may feel lonely upon discovering that almost all your peers and friends have no time or desire to join you there.

I’m fortunate in that none of this is too heavy of a price for me to pay. But I don’t expect that most people can or should feel the same way. If you truly feel that your life is missing too much of the stuff that “really matters”, what hard choices are you prepared to make to change that? Call me pessimistic if you must, but I do believe that there’s a tragic dimension to life that needs to be confronted and accepted.

Abraham Maslow said that “It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.” In the absence of that knowledge, people at least understand what it is they’re supposed to want and make impotent gestures in that direction which will, of course, do nothing to alleviate their existential aches.

Anyone who challenges the narrow practicality that dominates education will be suspected of elitist or aristocratic pretensions. The risk should be run. For if a liberal education is to regain its vitality, it must recapture its nonutilitarian dimension. Thinking, reading, and art require a cultural space, a zone free from the angst of moneymaking and practicality. Without a certain repose or leisure, a liberal education shrivels.

Today, to mention leisure evokes images of retirement communities or television viewing. Leisure has lost meaning, succumbing to the general fetish of leisure in a consumer society. In America leisure usually means buying or doing or watching something. The 1911 commission that validated an educational shift from academic to useful subjects listed the “worthy use of leisure” as one goal. “This objective calls for the ability to utilize the common means of enjoyment, such as music, art, literature, drama and social intercourse, together with the fostering in each individual of one or more special avocational interests.” The terms are revealing: leisure, the very antithesis of utility, must be “useful.”

Sebastian de Grazia, in his Of Time, Work and Leisure, sought to disentangle leisure from “free time,” an empty category. “Free time refers to a special way of calculating a special kind of time. Leisure refers to a state of being.” Originally leisure signaled something like quiet reflection. As the point of work and life, leisure or contemplation sustained Western culture.

…A liberal education requires a cultural breathing space, a small refuge. Reading, writing and thinking are delicate activities, easily numbed by the dint of money, shopping and jobs. This is not a judgment on individuals, who live as they must, but a judgment on a society that constricts the education it provides.

Jacoby is, of course, talking about the sorry state of higher education, but he could just as easily be summing up my complaint about Nicholas Carr’s big idea. The supposed neurological differences between reading a dead-tree book or a Nook book are petty when compared to the larger forces that prevent most people from having the time or inclination to read anything at all.

Speaking of Carr, a frequent enough target of my spitballs, I will say that this review of his latest book seems pretty unfair. I don’t think he’s paranoid or a scaredy-cat; he’s just barking up the wrong tree.

That is why, I think, the Day of Unplugging is such a strange thing. Those who unplug have every intention of plugging back in. This sort of stunt presents an experiment, with its results determined beforehand; one finds exactly what one expects to find: never more, often less. It’s one of the reasons that the unplugging movement has attracted such vocal criticism from the likes of Nathan Jurgenson, Alexis Madrigal, and Evgeny Morozov. If it takes unplugging to learn how better to live plugged in, so be it. But let’s not mistake such experiments in asceticism for a sustainable way of life. For most of us, the modern world is full of gadgets and electronics, and we’d do better to reflect on how we can live there than to pretend we can live elsewhere.

It seems like a fairly innocuous and sensible article to me. And yet, Freddie’s jimmies have gotten all a-rustled by it. He seems to think that Cep and people like her are overreacting out of feeling threatened by alternative behavior, in which case I can only say, blogger, critique thyself. Really, I don’t get any sense whatsoever that she’s acting to stamp out heresy. Not everything is an issue of insecure powerbrokers trying to maintain their sweaty grip upon the levers of control. People are just having a conversation, dude, relax.

It’s funny, because, looked at from a different angle, this would seem to be the kind of thing he usually criticizes: an impotent yet self-congratulatory little niche movement, another roundabout method of social sorting and status-seeking. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t have any problem with the Unpluggers myself, and I’m not accusing them of failing to live up to any revolutionary ideals. I’m just agreeing with Cep’s basic question: Why bring it up? Why make a “thing” out of it? Most of us cross the digital/meatspace border back and forth on a regular basis without feeling the need to Instagram the occasion. What does it mean to call attention to it?

In other words, rather than simply shut the laptop and go work in the garden for a while with no fanfare, the Unpluggers are consciously differentiating between the two experiences. As the poets might say, they’re naming the experiences in order to signify something about them. For example, walking. It’s something most of us have been doing since we were toddlers and continue to do when necessary, something we don’t often think about. But to someone like Wayne Curtis, walking is an ideological subject in itself. It is a very specific, purposeful action, perhaps even a way of life, with its attendant behaviors, attitudes and values. But by naming something, you’re also, if only by implication, calling attention to what it is not. And so, especially for a subject about which not much of interest can be said to begin with, one easy way to create an identity is to contrast the subject with its opposite. Thus walking, rather than being an unremarkable method of locomotion, also becomes a way of contrasting oneself favorably to those who don’t walk for pleasure.

What, then, are the Unpluggers signifying by the conspicuous way they go about their business? Why have they decided, like dilettante Amish, to draw the line at technology developed in the last two decades or so? These are perfectly valid questions for someone like Cep to ask. What, this is part of your identity? This is an important ritual behavior for you? Well, okay, that’s fine; I’m sure the marketing department is already preparing some targeted ads for your demographic to aid in your quest for an authentic, analog experience. I hope you didn’t have any higher aspirations than that, though.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.